Rock*A*Teens Interview

Last Updated : 17-Feb-99

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It begins with the sound of a single electric guitar, a plastic pick coarsely scratching its six strings like an unresined bow on an out-of-tune violin. Drums thump urgently in double-time. Then, as two more cheesy off-brand electric guitars swirl into the chaotic echo-chamber mix, disheveled wildman Chris Lopez leans to the microphone and lets loose quavering madhouse vocals. His lyrics are almost unintelligible, but the rollicking spirit and high energy here are infectious.

The trio of guitars work the crowd separately, each venturing through different melodic terrain, but all three collide back together in synch at every bamp-bah of the chorus. It's an experience for the ears -- but also for the eyes, chest, and feet; and just when it seems to end, Lopez' inhuman wail triggers yet another verse. The song is "Down With People." The band is the Rock*A*Teens, and they're revving like they've just scored a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon and are off to take their neighbors for a joyride.

"The name Rock*A*Teens came to me in a dream," says cherubic drummer Chris Verene, his face candy-colored as he clowns at a wooden table in the Nuevo Laredo Catina. The scene is considerably calmer tonight as the musicians assemble over booze and burritos to discuss their recently completed Daemon Records CD, The Rock*A*Teens, recorded under the tutlege of producer David Barbe (Sugar, Buzz Hungry). Singer/guitarist Lopez looks alert but windblown in his thrift store threads. Second guitarist Justin Hughes (who could almost pass as Lopez' brother) sits and smiles quietly, from time to time sharing a knowing glance with third guitarist Kelly Hogan. Hogan arrives fresh a day's work on her forthcoming solo album, and tonight her stunning physical beauty is partly concealed behind thick eyeglasses and a heavy brown corduroy coat. The combined pedigree of this bunch is the envy of about every band in town. Lopez is a veteran of both Dirt and the Opal Foxx Quartet. Hughes and Verene were in DQE. Hogan fronted the Jody Grind.

The Rock*A*Teens' own description of their sound is "Orbisonic reverb-drenched art-billy bummer rock" and although Lopez is certainly no Roy Orbison, the label fits. Many of the group's songs have the rhythm and structure of Orbison classics such as "It's Over," with lyrics expressing similarly operatic levels of pain and desperation -- all of it drowned in a sorrowful sea of Sun Records echo.

"We were gonna be called Down With People, or the Orbisonics, or the Orbiholics," chuckles Hogan between sips of a frozen margarita, "but then Verene had that dream. He came to practice and he said, I had a dream. I can't tell you. I'm gonna write it on this piece of paper and show it to you. And he gave us this piece of paper -- it was like a grocery store receipt. It said the Rock-a-teens. In red ink."

Nocturnal visions aside, the name does have a history. In 1959 a New York-based band called the Rock-a-Teens scored a #16 hit with "Whoo-Hoo," a dance instrumental punctuated with cries of the song's title. Lopez quickly dismisses the comparison. "I've never seen their record," he says. Hogan adds that her band wanted to call their CD Boo Hoo, but that the label rejected the idea. "They said it sounded too heavy metal," Lopez comments cryptically. "I thought about it with umlauts over the o's," he adds.

The story of Atlanta's own Rock*A*Teens began on April 1, 1994, when Lopez rang Hogan's doorbell and asked if she'd like to play some music. "I'd been talking about learning to play guitar," she recalls, "and I said okay, so we started playing a little bit. Then one day Verene came over to see Steve Dixon, and he was leaving and he said can I use your bathroom? When he came out of the bathroom he asked, Whatcha been doing? and I said I been playing with Lopez, and we need a drummer. And he said oh really?"

"It never would have occurred to me to go and play drums with Kelly," says Verene, "but it blew my mind when I realized it could have been possible. Then she called Chris [Lopez] on the phone right then and said, you wanna play with Chris [Verene]? And he was like, Hell yeah!"

"Yeah," explains Lopez, "'cause =I= was playing the drums at the time."

"It was a sun-drenched day," beams Verene.

"So that was like around May," continues Hogan, "and then we started playing, and we played a while, wrote a few songs, and we decided we needed another guitar player; and Verene said I got the perfect person but he's still in college [in Indiana] and he won't be here until June. So we said okay, we'll wait. And then the first day he tried to come to practice, he had a car wreck trying to find Cabbagetown -- so we had to wait an extra week. So then he came and we played for like a week or so -- this was like the first week of June -- and we decided we needed to set up a show or else we'd never do anything. So we set up a show for Dottie's in July."

The three-guitars-but-no-bass lineup evolved of necessity. "None of us =has= a bass," explains Lopez. "That's a moot point."

"I been in bands without a bass for longer than I can remember," adds Verene, who compensates on the drums, "so I just play both."

"Justin had that car wreck," continues Hogan, "which was pretty cool, and then he brought that special secret weapon, the homemade wah-wah-wah-wah-wah pedal -- the Fat City V [pronounced "five"] -- and we went awwwwwwright!"

Hughes grins. "It's a homemade vibrato pedal a friend of my mine made. It's blue and big and has these two things sticking up. The new, improved model is on order."

The Rock*A*Teens are known to many as "the band in which Kelly Hogan doesn't sing," for Hogan's astounding vocal talent is not invoked in her work here. "I didn't want to have to worry about singing," she explains. "This is a different thing. I'd never been in a band where I wasn't the front person, and it was cool just to get my yee-huh feeling from playing. I wanted Lopez to assume the throne."

"It was like, now she can do her own thing -- and do this, play guitar," adds Lopez.

"Now," she laughs, "I can play when I have the flu and laryngitis."

The first track on the band's CD is "Down With People." Asked to explain what's going on in that song, Lopez answers, "It's kinda like a play on Up With People. In my mind the song is kinda like a Motown song, kinda like a Supremes song, mixed with other various stacks of fun. It's not really about being down with people. It's not really about anything. The title came before the song."

"We were just crackin' up on the porch one day," says Hogan. "We decided if we weren't gonna be that band, we'd have a song called `Down With People.' Plus it cracks me up that it's so yeah-yeah- yeah, and it's called `Down with People.'"

Another selection, "Ram's Den" was inspired by the name of a sleazy Cabbagetown bar. "It was this hand-lettered, hand-painted cinderblock bar," explains Hogan. "I always wanted to go in it, and all of a sudden it was closed down."

"Lyrically," says Lopez, "it's like an episode where the worst possible thing's happening to ya. Cause basically the part of the song where it kinda comes to a head is, `I stand outside and shake.' It's about being upset, like something happens, you see your girlfriend kissing another man -- you know, something freaky like that, complete upheaval in your whole life -- where you don't think anything's ever gonna be the same again. You can't sleep, you can't eat, and you walk the floor."

The song "Return as a Bird" is about reincarnation. "This one day on the back porch," recalls Lopez, "this bird just sat and hung out there with us, and went over and sat on Jim's lap and was hopping around. It was very uncharacteristic for a bird, and then it went up on the roof above the door and was pushing sticks off the roof onto people and stuff. And later Kelly came over and I was telling her the story and she was going, Allen [Allen Page, deceased drummer of the Opal Foxx Quartet] always said he was gonna come back as a bird. That's what the song's about."

Hughes plays the piano on that track. "It was a standup piano," he says. "Just a little bit of Phil Spector-like duhn duhn duhn." Asked if there's any chance the Rock*A*Teens will add the piano to their live set, Lopez quips, "If I can't get a bass, we certainly won't own a piano."

On "Who Killed Bobby Fuller?" the band addresses the mystery of the "I Fought the Law" pop star's death. "They found him in his car, with his hands tied," says Lopez, "and he'd swallowed gasoline -- but they ruled his death a suicide."

"Pretty shady," says Hogan suspiciously. "They say maybe he had gambling debts or messed with the wrong person's woman."

"A mobster's girlfriend," Lopez speculates. "Nobody knows."

The song refers to the water commissioner. "That's like a Chinatown reference," explains Lopez. "It's about California, or Hollywood, that kinda lifestyle." The song features guitars in alternate tunings, with Hogan's instrument reset to D. "On `Picks Her Teeth' I tune down to C for some boing-boing-boing action," she explains. "There's two songs we tune down to open D -- `MacGyver' and `Bobby Fuller.' We've got a new song we're working on that I tune down to A. Retune like, bah-whaaaunngh."

"Lucia P." is based on the true saga of a space music queen whose piano player died onstage during a performance. "She was playing a show," says Lopez, "and he just -- khunk! -- died. Had a heart attack and died onstage, and she continued and finished the show because `he would have wanted it that way.' And that's in the lyrics to the song."

When I point out that this track has some of the most interesting sonic stuff going on in it, Hogan responds, "Whah-whah-whah-whah -- that?" She raises an eyebrow at Hughes.

Hughes grins. "The Fat City V -- that's what it's doin'! A delay pedal that just suddenly started screaming."

"Me and Kelly tend to play the song part," says Lopez, "and Justin plays melodies."

"It's like, okay, meet ya at the end of the song!" giggles Hogan. She waves a napkin like a flag. "See ya at the end, I hope!"

"HingHangHung" has a doo-wop-gone-mad feel. "Musically it's kinda like a '50s pop ballad, stuff I kinda really like." explains Lopez. "Lyrically it kinda comes from Night of the Hunter with Robert Mitchum. There's a part where the little kid's father is hung for stealing, but right when his father's dead there's a part in the film where the two little kids are in the front yard and there's some other kids across the street and they're singing this little children's song, "Hing Hang Hung...." They're like makin' fun that they're dad was hung, 'cause they're outcasts. Their dad was a criminal."

"Actually," says drummer Verene, "I think the whole thing is an elaborate waltz, and that's what I'm playing. I mean a huge open waltz with strict adherence to the waltz beat."

Hughes gets in the spirit. "I think it's a '60s Nashville country song," he declares. "That's what I'm playing."

The most unusual track on the CD is "R*A*T*Step," a Hogan cheerleader chant ("P! A-R-T-Y! Party hearty in Rock*A*Teens style!") featuring a snappin' piece of plywood. "Me and my friend Caroline Young were co-captains on that thing," Hogan explains. "We had done these tapes in the practice space and it was about five in the morning and I started doing that cheer from when I was a cheerleader in the Sixth Grade. It's so ridiculous. And my friend Caroline was a real cheerleader for school teams. I was a wannabe cheerleader for, like, little league teams. We both knew that same cheer. It was pretty goofy because we were doin' it at Bosstown Studios. First of all, we were these goofy dorks at Bosstown where they do all the Bobby Brown and TLC stuff. All these people kept looking down the hall at us all week like, what the hell are those people doing? Verene had a big thing of newspaper on his head to keep his headphones on, and we'd duct-tape his headphones on every day and he'd walk down the hall in his shorts with no shirt."

"Bosstown studios was so fancy," remembers Verene. "The employees were dressed to the nines and we looked like, you know....the Rock*A*Teens." They all laugh.

"So Caroline set up a piece of plywood," continues Hogan, "and we miked the plywood and we rehearsed it once to make sure -- because she had indigenous Tucker words to it, and I had the Douglasville words to it. Different words. It was just fun. I think at the end, if they left it playing, there was a `Where's my bourbon?!' We were just goofin' around. People were comin' in going, what the hell are those two white girls doin'?"

"We made a conscious effort to put it on the tape," says Lopez quietly.

"Caroline came for a `sesh,'" Hogan declares. "She was a hired gun."

"Turned up with her quart of beer in her hand," adds Lopez, "and she said, Let's go! Roll tape!"

The Rock*A*Teens' version of James and Bobby Purify's 1966 hit "I'm Your Puppet" was recorded in the band's practice space at Lopez' house, complete with layers of natural -- and sometimes unnatural - - background noise, including shouted admonitions from Hogan. "I'm saying, `Don't hang yourself. This is where it's happenin' -- on the street,'" she laughs.

Though the track was `sweetened' after the fact in the studio, the basic recording came from a cassette copy. "It was almost a lost song," says Hughes. "We owe deep thanks to Rick Jones for recording it."

"I been knowing that song from my friend the Bullet," Lopez explains. "He comes over and plays songs, and I just knew it. One of the few songs where I can remember the whole thing."

"But you play it as you remember it," Hogan admonishes him, "not how it really is."

Lopez shrugs. "There's like a bridge in there somewhere that of course he gave me shit for not doing. `You really suck -- you don't even do the bridge!'"

"The first time we did that cheer [`R*A*T*Step'], that was that same session," Hogan remembers. "It was five in the morning. We were so tired. Whooooh."

"Lots of background singing, hand-clapping," adds Lopez.

Verene smiles. "Butt-shakin'."

Asked about another track, "The Latin Social," Verene lights up. "It has an absolute story," he declares. "A long time ago when I was in high school [Druid Hills High School], I was in DQE way back then and, um, I was in the Latin Club -- which was like the smallest, most nerdy club that you could possibly be in, and there was nothing to it except a coupla classes. Our teacher decided that the Latin Club should actually do something, 'cause we were a club. She said, let's have a Latin Social. Who will host it? My parents agreed to host the Latin Social in our basement, which was DQE's practice space at the time, but it got all spruced back up. It was an old style southern rec room that had been there when we moved in, and it had shuffleboard laid out on the floors and, like, a BB gun target thing; and it was all painted primary blue and red like a big romper room, and we were all down there having like little deviled eggs and potato chips and stuff people had brought. The people who were there were the kinda people who had never even been to a school function before. The whole point of this is that years and years went by, and one day at band practice Justin mentioned that, although I didn't know him at the time, he was at the Latin Social! And then Kelly said, that's the name of the song we had just started working on. Chris wrote the lyrics that came to be about that story."

"It's about a perversion of the story," adds Hughes. "It's about standing in the corner, pretty much.

Hughes is responsible for the "96 Tears" style organ-playing on "Picks Her Teeth." Lopez recalls that Bosstown Studios has "a real fancy" organ. "The speaker spins around," marvels Hughes. "They happened to have one and it hadn't been used in years. Who wants an organ these days?"

Lopez explains that "Cropdust" is "kinda about drifterism." When I put forth Kerouac's name, he quickly dispels that notion. "Not so romantic," he explains. "Drifter/loserism....It's also kinda like about Cary Grant in North By Northwest, walking down that road by himself and the plane starts in. Standin' in that road, he looks kinda lonesome."

The most Orbisonic of the CD's tunes is its final track, the "Running Scared"-style lover's bolero "Arm in Arm, In the Golden Twilite, We Loitered On..." which features Bill Taft (Smoke, the Jody Grind) on cornet. "It's just an overly dramatic epic," says Lopez. "Drama. We're into the drama."

Hughes grins. "Oh yeah, melodrama please. Give me more."

Curious, I ask about other songs they may have recorded that didn't make the record, pointing to an old set list with such titles as "I'm Forgetting," "Triplet Man," and "MacGyver."

"We recorded all those songs," Lopez declares.

"No, we didn't record `Triplet Man.'" corrects Hogan.

"That's true," says Hughes, "but we did it at WREK. Yeah, we've recorded all those songs. `MacGyver' is just a different name."

"We recorded both of those other songs," says Hogan. "`MacGyver''s real name is -- don't tell me -- `Run and Hide' -- but we always call it `MacGyver' because it sounds like the theme song from CHiPs or something, like a Quinn Martin Production."

"We got a show in New York and a show in Boston," says Lopez, when asked about the band's immediate tour plans. "We're just gonna do those and then come back."

"I been working on my solo thing," says Hogan. "I knew that that was gonna be over right when the Rock*A*Teens' record came out, so it's gonna be Rock*A*Teens for a while -- which kinda works out since I have guys from Flap and Gold Sparkle in my [solo] band, so they're gonna do that for a while. We just have to plan way in advance."

During the summer Hogan and Lopez played out in a Jonathan Richman cover band called JR. As a final question, I ask if they're still doing that. Lopez quickly answers no, but Hogan smiles and adds, "That band was what we-did-on-our-summer-vacation. It was just for fun."

With dinner -- and the interview -- essentially over, I yield the floor to a photographer who's come to shoot the band. As the boys rearrange restaurant furniture for the session, Hogan (the self- proclaimed "math girl") takes the check and begins dividing it out the staggering total. During an hour-long session these "Orbiholic" musicians have run up a margaritas-and-beer tab only slightly smaller than the city treasury of Monterrey. So what do they do as the camera is set up? Why, of course, they order another round. (To their credit, though, none seem to be showing any ill effects.)

After being asked to perch atop the Nuevo Laredo jukebox for one novelty shot, Lopez scrounges some change and punches up the Troggs' 1966 hit "With a Girl Like You." Its catchy "bah-bah bah- bah-bah" chorus fills the room.

"I can't believe this is on there!" shouts Hogan.

"We forgot to tell you, Greg," explains Lopez, "that we've also recorded this song -- but it's not on the record."

Drinking and singing along, the musicians party hearty -- in Rock*A*Teens style.

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